Contributors

Dr Luisa Dillner is a doctor and a publishing director at the British Medical Journal Publishing Group. Published by the Guardian, the Observer, Cosmopolitan, Vogue and Elle, she has also written for the famous Mumsnet website where her letters for mothers have been sent out for seven years. She has four children, lives in London and most importantly has a perfect long term relationship…

Andrew Dilnot is Warden of Nuffield College, University of Oxford and former director of the Institute of Fiscal Studies.

Jonathan Dimbleby is a writer, broadcaster and film-maker. He presents Any Questions? and Any Answers? for BBC Radio 4 and presented ITV's flagship weekly political program This Week for over ten years. In 2008 his five part series on Russia was broadcast by BBC 2 accompanied by his book, Russia – A Journey to the Heart of a Land and its People; other books include Charles: the Private Man, The Public Face and The Last Governor. His 2010 seriesAn African Journey and 2011 series A South American Journey were both broadcast on BBC2. In addition to his Presidency of VSO, he is Chair of Index on Censorship and a Trustee of Dimbleby Cancer Care.

Jenny Diski is the acclaimed author of numerous works of fiction and non-fiction. Her journalism has appeared theSunday Times, Observer and London Review of Books among others. She lives in Cambridge.

Simon Dixon is Professor of Russian History at University College, London.

Henry Dimbleby is the co-founder of LEON, and the Director of The Sustainable Restaurant Association, which runs some of London's most successful street food markets. His work with DEFRA culminated in the National Food Strategy – a policy proposal widely praised by industry wide figures such as Yotam Ottolenghi and Sir Partha Dasgupta. In 2013 he co-authored The School Food Plan, which set out actions to transform what children eat in schools and how they learn about food.

Garry Disher has published sixty titles across multiple genres, and is known as Australia's King of Crime. He has won the Deutscher Krimi Preis four times and the Ned Kelly Award three times. In 2018 he received the Ned Kelly Lifetime Achievement Award.

Andrew Ziminski is a stonemason, church conservator and author living and working in Frome, Somerset. He has four decades of experience working on some of the greatest cathedrals and churches in Britain, including the tower of Salisbury Cathedral and the dome of St Paul's in London. He is a SPAB William Morris Craft Fellow, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, and conservation advisor to the Salisbury Diocesan advisory committee for the care of churches. He is the author of The Stonemason: A History of Building Britain.

Sol Yurick was born in 1925 in New York. The son of Jewish immigrants, Yurick grew up in a politically active working-class household. He enlisted in the Army during the Second World War, then studied literature before taking a job in New York City's welfare department, where he became familiar with the children of welfare families, many of whom belonged to youth gangs. This experience formed the basis for The Warriors, his first and best-known novel. He was a lifelong social activist and lived his whole life in New York; he died in Brooklyn in 2013.

Dave Zeltserman's first 'badass out of prison' novel, Small Crimes, received widespread acclaim, with NPR naming it one of the 5 best crime and mystery novels of 2008 and the Washington Post naming it one of the best books of 2008. Dave's second 'badass out of prison' novel, Pariah, was named by the Washington Post as one of the best books of 2009. Dave lives in the Boston area with his wife, Judy; is a die-hard Patriots and Red Sox fan; and when he's not writing crime fiction he spends his time studying martial arts, and holds a black belt in Kung Fu.

Stefan Zweig (1981-1942) was the most widely translated writer of the 1920s and 1930s. A Jewish pacifist, he was driven by the Nazis into exile, first in London, then in Brazil, where he committed suicide in a pact with his wife. The manuscript for The Post Office Girl was found among his papers. Zweig's other novels include Beware of Pity and Chess Story.

Lea Ypi is Professor in Political Theory at the London School of Economics, and an Honorary Professor in Philosophy at the Australian National University. Her latest book, Free, a memoir exploring freedom and her childhood in post-soviet Albania, was the winner of the Ondaatje Prize, a Sunday Times Book of the Year and has been translated into thirty languages.